


Rocker Who?

by espressoempress



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Clara is gone, Dealing With Loss, Friendship, Gen, Healing, I needed to write something so I could put all my feelings in one place, Original Character(s), Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:49:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5497625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressoempress/pseuds/espressoempress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sadness is a cosmological constant, a universal touchstone-”<br/>“Like a lingua franca?”<br/>“Precisely. No two people’s sadness have the same roots, but the understanding of the feeling is very nearly subatomic, and it resonates.”<br/>“Physically-induced empathy,” Keiko said, chuckling despite herself.<br/>“More like a frequency. See all these funny little people walking by?” John gave a wave to the pedestrians. “Tuned out to our specific frequency. Nobody stopping by to listen, or to chat, caught up in their own private worlds.”</p><p>In which the Doctor finds someone who listens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rocker Who?

“Where’s the iron?”

Eyes tearing away from the strings, Keiko’s dark head raised from its home against her chest.

“I’m serious, I’ve got to leave in fifteen.”

“In the laundry room, next to the hamper,” Keiko called to her mom. She nestled her chin back against her collarbone and plucked another note. She made a mark on her sheet music, propped open on the bed next to her, and started from the beginning.

“Right, I’m off,” her mother Toriko said, appearing in the doorway, suit and shirt freshly ironed. Had it been fifteen minutes already? Keiko tended to lose track of time; zoned into the music, let everything else fall away.

“Working late again?”

“Most likely.”

Keiko stared at her fret, smiled a little.

“Can I hear?” her mom asked. Keiko looked up.

“Sure.” She started again with a faster tempo, black nails sliding up and down the neck, teasing out low and deep tones with fingers that couldn’t keep up. She sort of stumbled to a stop, and put the bass down when she saw her mom beaming.

“What?”

“Nothing. I like it.”

“I’ve still got to smooth it out in the rough patches. I don’t know what I’ll even do once it’s done.”

“Record it and put it online?” her mom suggested. “Lots of things you can do with the internet nowadays.”

“Eh, I dunno.” Keiko wanted to write songs, and that was it. “Probably just keep it to myself.”

“You’re good at it, though.”

“It’s just a hobby. People always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Assume that you want to make money off your hobbies.”

“So what you’re saying is you don’t want to help out with your pre-med tuition?” Toriko frowned, eyebrows raised.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Keiko smiled.

“Okay, I gotta go. Leftovers in the fridge.”

“Have a good day.”

The front door slammed and silence fell. Keiko took up her bass again.

 

The Takamatsu house was less a house, more a broom closet that was deeper on the inside - a three-floored, brick faced townhouse with blue shutters and a front garden that Toriko treated like a second child. Mr. Takamatsu had died five years ago, and Toriko weathered the storm of his passing like the rocks of her native Okinawa. She threw herself bodily into her work at a local conglomerate, was promoted twice in two months, and landed the comfortably hectic position of Assistant Director of Human Resources and Personnel. Keiko, at the delicate age of nineteen, had been less stalwart in dealing with the loss of her father; she cut her hair, dyed all her clothes black, took up smoking and guitar in her spare time, and failed nearly all her entrance exams.

And yet, the storm had died down, and they were still standing. After six months of tutoring Keiko retook her exams. She kicked the cigarettes when she got into ICL, put her shoulders back, and smashed into a brick wall. Workload, atmosphere, lectures, and a boatload of new, snobby people.

Everything felt wrong, like she’d dropped onto an alien planet.

“I feel like I’m in one of those Survivor challenges, like I’m Bear Grylls and this is Siberia, or the Gobi Desert,” she said to her friend Gale one day.

“Are you just saying that ‘cos the food tastes like piss?”

Keiko shrugged and traipsed off to Contemporary Music Theory with a frown on her face.

Music theory has this air around it that no one acknowledges but nonetheless pisses off aspiring musicians; a sort of hippie vibe. Anyone outside the music world sees music as that decorative, flimsy thing for flunkies. “Oh I always wanted to learn to play the cello!” they bemoan in that wistful voice that lacks passion. To them, music is an inherent gift they don’t possess; they prefer the concrete pursuits, you know, the pursuits that have an actual return on investment. They’ll praise you for your talent with an instrument one moment and insinuate that it isn’t a real job the next.

Keiko enjoyed music theory; her professor, Mr. MacPherson, was an unyielding, mustachioed flautist from Northern Ireland. He was boisterous and animated, often talked himself red in front of the class. His excitement for music was tangible, and it made the daily slog of anatomical Latin and organic chemistry that much easier.

Fifteen minutes into class that day, Mr. MacPherson started with a story from his theatre days when a pratfall went horribly wrong and, at the insistence of several students, demonstrated the proper way to fall onstage. The class burst out laughing and Keiko’s phone rang. She was still smiling when the voice on the other end said her mother had suffered a massive aneurysm and died.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry-”

“No, no you have the wrong number. My mom just had a check-up-”

“Ms. Takamatsu, I’m so sorry.”

Takamatsu was a common Japanese name. How many Takamatsu’s could there be in the UK? There had to be at least two hundred. At least fifty. No fewer than ten. He could be talking about any one of them.

“Please, there has to be someone else,” she said. “You - no, you’re talking about someone else, right? I’m Keiko Takamatsu. My mom is-”

“Toriko Takamatsu, 45, 150 centimeters, 49 kilos,” he responded heavily.

“That… where? Where? I - no, I just,” Keiko rushed out of the room, heart pounding against her ribcage, lungs shrinking. She had to tell herself to breathe.

“Breathe, Ms. Keiko, breathe. Sit down. I’m sorry, I’ve never informed next of kin before, I’m sorry, I just started today, I’m doing awful, aren’t I?” the man blathered. His apologies faded with the pumping blood and crushing warmth in Keiko’s head. It felt like a fever, cold blood snaking through hot muscles, a throbbing chill that wracked her bones. _Is this what death feels like?_

 

The iPod dashed against the wall, headphones crunched under her heel. She tucked her guitar away into the deep dark of the upstairs linen closet. The days passed in oppressive silence. Keiko’s stomach twisted into a dense chain of knots, a measure away from exploding.

She dropped her music electives and changed her major to Physics with SciEd. She hated it. She didn’t care. She picked up a part-time job in a shop to support the mortgage. She slept five hours, took the bus to school, went to work, went home, studied, cried, and slept five hours. Rinse and repeat. A packed schedule full of distraction, free from free time, kept her focus off the shrine in the living room - the seven little luck god figurines, the incense, the wooden prayer talismans and condolence cards.

Like this she continued, head down, eyes caked with make-up to keep back tears, for three weeks.

Three weeks and a day after she identified her mother in the hospital, Keiko walked by a bench. She walked by it every day, the same way she walked by stop signs and crossing guards and kiosks. For twenty-one days the bench was silent. A man feeding pigeons, a mother and son laughing at a video, a senior reading a newspaper, three dog-walkers. People you don’t notice; all buzzing silence to her ears.

On the twenty-second day Keiko stopped and started to cry. A sad melody curled in the air and wrapped a lasso around her throat, forced a sob from her black lips, made her choke and bawl in the middle of a bustling sidewalk. Weak at the knees she put a hand over her mouth, tried to stifle the sound and stem the running mascara.

The song was light and soft like a porcelain cup, delicate and terribly sad - as if it broke with each note and reassembled before the next, ever-shattering, ever-mending. It was the sound of a destroyed heart filtered through the wordless medium of a six stringed guitar. Keiko felt her own heart resonate and tear at the seams. She turned and saw a blurry figure, gray head bowed under the weighty sadness. She spied sunglasses, a longcoat over a sweater, and an expression halfway between stoic and desolated. That face drove a spike through her core, and it reeled her in; her feet moved to the bench.

“Excuse me,” she said, voice broken beyond repair. Large, old eyes examined her over the black glasses.

“I…” Her tongue tied itself like a Celtic knot. “Stay there!”

She turned back and ran home, bottomless loss biting at her heels.

 

Keiko stood in the doorway, teetering on the threshold. The house was aggressively empty; dishes piled on the counter; dust gathering under the couch; dead and dying flowers on windowsills; food packages crowded around the bins. She dropped her backpack, leapt blindly upstairs, and exploded into her room. She dove for her closet, ripped through the junk, grabbed her black case and hefted it over her shoulder.

The old man was still on the bench strumming. The song was ponderous but not elaborate. Nothing simpler than heartbreak; tale as old as time, that one. No need for embellishment.

“May I?” she asked, case clutched tight to her chest. There was no collection tin or open case at his feet. He wasn’t playing for money. He played for himself; an exercise in sorrowful self-indulgence.

He didn’t say no and she sat. Keiko pulled out her bass and settled into a position so familiar it hurt. She plucked in tandem with his melody, offered up an improvised, hesitant harmony. Her fingers shook and dropped notes into his song like discordant rain drops. After a time the timid stream became a deep current under the river of his sadness. The thing he wove couldn’t be matched in depth or beauty, but she persisted. Keiko felt her age and inexperience like a weight in place of her heart. Discomfort snuck up her spine and stung her eyes; her tune stumbled but continued on spindly, bowed legs.

The song burned white like Rigel, burned large like Antares, stars of every magnitude spilled off his strings like fireflies twelve at a time. He twisted with the tendrils of a singularity, and grabbed at every bit of her. His notes were spun from golden stardust and the stuff of galaxies; cloudy nebulae hovered over his curls, hair shining like brushed steel. In comparison Keiko felt small, adding electrons to a celestial tapestry, adding whispers to an opera. She was a bacterium next to his universe. But she wasn’t playing to match; she was playing for her own catharsis. She had to let the void in her center hurt. _I miss you, I miss you, I don’t know how I’m going to survive, mum; I can’t do anything without you. I’m a goddamn shambles; I’m like a dissolving coral reef._ With each pang came a new string of notes. _I miss you._ Another measure. _I miss you._ Another measure. _What is my life without you?_ Another measure. _How do I adapt to this?_ She gripped the neck so hard it dug into her palm. Her fingertips were going red and numb.

The man slowed to a graceful stop. Night had fallen. Stars blinked to life above the city lights. A chill drifted through the streets.

“I should go home,” she said, but didn’t move.

“I should go too,” he agreed, folding up his sunglasses. Scottish, she thought.

“Did…?” she began to ask, but thought better of it.

“Hm?”

“Did something bad happen?” she asked. She stared at the ground.

“Hah. When doesn’t it?” he replied.

“Did you lose someone?”

“I did. My best friend.” The tone suggested an intimidating depth of connection.

“I lost my mum.”

“You’re not bad, you know.”

She felt a pang of pride and pulled the guitar tight. “Thanks. I’ve been off it for a bit,” she swallowed. “Gave it up. Tried to go silent. Nothing felt right.”

“Past tense?”

“It comes and goes. Playing feels good, I guess. Thank you.”

“Thank _you_ ,” he said, like he genuinely appreciated her company.

“I’m Keiko.”

He inhaled into his name. “John.” The cadence of a practiced lie. She didn’t indulge her suspicion.

She shook his hand. It felt like leather. “What brings you to London, John?”

“Can’t a Scotsman take a train without declaring war on you lot?” he joked.

Keiko paused and pursed her lips. “Are you really Scottish?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. You just seem less normal than most people.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “Is this how you talk to everyone?”

“I don’t talk to everyone, I just talk to weird people.”

“Oh I’m not people.”

She cracked a smile and fiddled with a string. “All people get sad. You’re sad. Ergo, you must be people.”

“That’s rock-solid reasoning right there, you should be a logician.”

“I tried logic. Doesn’t work well for me,” she sighed.

“Me neither,” John smirked. The street lamp closest to their bench flickered out. He pulled out a small wand; it emitted a high-pitched whir and a blue flash. The light flicked back on. He winked at her. Keiko's eyes went wide.

“How’d you do that?”

“Magic.”

“Looks like technology to me. Arthur C. Clarke said up to a point, they’re the same thing.”

“Yeah well Arty always was a fanciful bloke; never challenge him to a game of backgammon, he cheats.”

Keiko’s brow furrowed. _Sure. I’ll log that away under “bonkers trivia”._

“No offense but you seem a little-”

“Alien?”

“Well at least you said it. You’re not, right? These days it doesn’t hurt to check.”

“Usually I’d be happy to lie, but in this case,” John trailed off with a shrug.

“So you _are_?”

“Hello.” He waved with his disinterested, alien hand.

“But you said you were Scottish.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize aliens couldn’t have accents,” he said.

A beat passed and Keiko dug up a deadpan quip in the depths of her anxious mind. “For an alien you play a mean solo.”

“Oh, well, that’s the story of my life.”

To anyone unaccustomed to the loss of a loved one, the look on John’s face would’ve registered as playful. To Keiko it sounded so bitter she couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Sorry.”

“Ah, can’t be avoided. What about you? You thought about going solo?”

“Pfft. Not much point in being alone if you can’t show off to anyone,” she said with a brave attempt at a grin. He returned the gesture.

“Exactly!”

“Can you get home alright?”

“I’m not far; you?”

“I'm fine. Will you...” she stopped.

“Will I what?”

“Will you be here tomorrow?”

“It’s entirely possible. Don’t have much else to do at the moment.”

“No unsuspecting townsfolk to abduct?”

“Contrary to popular belief, most of us have better things to do with our time than sucking up humans in tractor beams.”

“Like organizing a rebellion of impostor people? Or wheeling around shouting “Exterminate”? Or bumming around the British Isles in a suit and specs playing sad songs? Gotta admit that one threw me for a loop.”

“Oi, humans aren’t the only ones who can lay around looking sad! I know a race of intelligent birds that waddle around on the ground their whole lives just because they’re too depressed to take flight.”

Keiko laughed nervously. “They don’t sound like they live very long.”

“Oh no, they’re rubbish birds; whole species died out before you could say “HMS Beagle”. My point is, sadness is a cosmological constant, a universal touchstone-”

“Like a lingua franca?”

“Precisely. No two people’s sadness have the same roots, but the understanding of the feeling is very nearly subatomic, and it resonates.”

“Physically-induced empathy,” Keiko said, chuckling despite herself.

“More like a frequency. See all these funny little people walking by?” John gave a wave to the pedestrians. “Tuned out to our specific frequency. Nobody stopping by to listen, or to chat, caught up in their own private worlds.”

“Tuneless,” she muttered with a tiny shake of her head. “I tried to go tuneless.” She’d managed for twenty-one days.

“But you couldn’t stay that way, because you’re a musician. Sometimes I think musicians are the best receivers; your channels are always open. It’s the only way you lot get any work done.”

“The trouble is shutting out the sad stuff when your head’s too full of sad,” Keiko sighed.

“Isn’t that what higher education is for?”

“Normally. I skipped class today. And my job. Think I needed this; needed to just stop, do something spontaneous. I’ve been too rigid the past few weeks.”

“What will you tell your friends tomorrow?”

“That I met an alien dressed like a rock star and we played a few songs and talked about existentialism until it got dark,” she smiled.

“Good for you; lying is for lesser souls.”

“Is your name really John?”

“You’re a quick one! I’m the Doctor.”

“Doctor who?”

“There ya go.”

“Is it like a stage name?”

“Sort of.”

“Would it be impertinent to ask what kind of alien you are?”

“Nothing wrong with impertinent. I’m a nosy, clever alien with a bungled spaceship and a death wish. You?” The Doctor held out his hand for a second handshake, this one slightly more honest than the last.

“Hipsterish, punkish physics major without a purpose or direction in life,” Keiko said after a moment’s thought.

“Care for a short trip in the ship? Might help you pick a direction.” He jutted a thumb over his shoulder, at a big, blue box in the alley. She hadn’t noticed it.

“What, in that thing?”

“Yes in that thing!”

“You said it was bungled. Is it because it’s a box? Easy to knacker a box, just takes an ax and a grudge-”

“It’s only bungled ‘cos the navigation goes wobbly sometimes - you get used to it.”

“Is that a promise?”

He shrugged.

“I’d have to call in a few hundred sick days.”

“No need, she’s a time travel ship too,” he said with a lazy snap. The doors swung open.

“Huh,” Keiko said. “You’re a right nutter, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

She took a look up at the black sky, checked her phone for missed messages, and sprang to her feet. She hooked a strap to her guitar and slung it over her back.

“I have mace, just sayin’.”

“Good thinking. Might be dangerous.”

“ _You_ might,” she corrected. Her black eyes didn’t waver.

“Fair enough,” the Doctor replied without missing a beat.

“Can I ask why you’re doing this? Or is it just ‘cos you’re bored?”

“I’m always bored. But I’ve never had a bassist in the TARDiS before.”

“What, so I’m you’re back-up? Are we a band now?”

“Why not? Let’s ‘op it, shall we love?” he said in a fake Cockney accent, rolling to his feet.

She watched him disappear into the box and took a second to dally. “No fanfare, no big lightshow, just pop in the box and off we go? Blimey, you must be lonely.”

“Glass houses, shreddanista,” he shouted from inside. His voice echoed oddly. Keiko poked her head in, then wrenched it out.

“Shit up my nose,” she muttered. She stepped over the threshold and the doors shut behind her. “It’s…” The inside was a massive spherical room, humming like it was alive. She looked up and around the center stack, an engine core she thought, orange and bright; buttons spilled over the hexagonal control panel like the contents of a disemboweled candy machine. There was a second level of bookshelves and chalkboards. Circular lights, more hexagons - he really liked hexagons - and lots of gray made up the walls. Everything blurred in the neon glow, too much to absorb at once.

“It’s deeper on the inside,” she said dumbly.

The Doctor “hmph”-ed. Keiko edged around the giant room, went up the steps to a shelf.

“Millions of years of scientific advancement in spacetime travel and you go for the books,” he said.

“I understand books - I don’t understand that.” She pointed at the main console.

“Didn’t you say you were a physics major?”

“Oi, only been doing it three weeks. ‘Sides, I doubt even Stephen Hawking could get any of this.”

“Why?”

“’Cos it’s alien and futuristic-”

“No, why physics?”

“Things are easier when they make sense. Set laws of celestial bodies, gravity, thermodynamics, all of it. Makes me feel like the universe is predictable. All this kinda fucks that into the ground a bit, though.”

He raised a heavy eyebrow at the curse but gave no other sign of admonishment.

“Shreddanista?” she smirked.

“Everyone needs a stage name,” he said defensively.

“You’re rubbish at names. What kind of rocker calls himself “Doctor”?”

“I wasn’t always a rocker. Only been on this for,” he flipped a switch to bring up a clock on the monitor, “ninety-four months and a bit. That is, if we aren’t counting the dial incident in all this…”

“What?”

“Pick a direction. Any place, any time,” he said. "Woodstock, 1969; the birth of the sun; there's a planet two hundred million years in the future where it rains three-foot icicles. Bring a good umbrella." 

Keiko, lap full of books, froze, mouth open. “Pick from everything that ever existed? Talk about a paradox of choice.”

“Come on, there’s got to be some place you always wanted to see. Now’s not the time to be holding back, shreddanista.”

“You’re going to try really hard to make that stick, aren’t you?”

“Keiko’s so painfully common, doesn’t it bother you?”

“Not until just now,” she grumbled. “Mum didn’t even get any choice in naming me, it was all gran. You know what “Keiko” means?”

“Blessed child.”

“Yeah. Also “lucky”. It’s like she was determined to force luck on the family. Stopped thinking I was lucky when dad died; when mum left it was like my luck went into negative digits.”

“So, shreddanista-”

“You are not calling me that.”

“Then what do I call you?” he asked, impatience rising. “Goth girl? Balthazar? Surinella the Seventh Bishop? Or I could just ignore you completely, if you wouldn’t mind that-”

“Fine! Call me shreddanista if you want-”

“Nah, I don’t like that anymore, bit of a mouthful. Let’s go back to Keiko.”

Keiko headbutted a secondhand copy of _Jane Eyre_. “I get the impression people slap you a lot.”

“Place, pick one, now.”

“I don’t know - Okinawa, 1540?”

“Not bad. Off we go.”


End file.
